Big Think Interview with Jonathan Zittrain | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Jonathan Zittrain

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A discussion with the professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jonathan Zittrain:

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources for the Harvard Law School Library, and Co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Previously, he was the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He was also a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School.

Zittrain’s research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education.

He is also the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Access Contested (MIT Press, 2011).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Jonathan Zittrain: I’m Jonathan Zittrain, I’m a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where I’m also a professor of law.

Topic: Evaluating the Ubiquitous Human Computer

Jonathan Zittrain: Well, I think a lot of computer scientists have been thinking about what they call ubiquitous computing, the idea that with really good bandwidth and wireless at that, and fast processors, there’ll be computers everywhere, more than just in your lap on a laptop or in a Hallmark card when you open it and it sings you happy birthday.

I’m interested in a counterpart to that, which I think of as ubiquitous human computing. And that is a trend that’s just starting to get ramped up, where we start to think of the human mind as if it were a server. As if it were a commodity that you could throw at a problem and ramp up by just investing a little bit more money in your project. And we see this in three layers, each of which has an example company at work and each example of which is really interesting to me. I like these companies, I like all three of them. But in total, I see reason to, I don’t know, be bemused about what’s happening.

At the top level of this phenomenon, is a company like InnoCentive. InnoCentive was started by a big pharmaceutical concern, to create a marketplace for companies, like itself, that might have engineering or scientific problems to solve that aren’t exactly Nobel Prize worthy, but are more complicated than just something you could send downstairs and to be able to take those problems, describe them, and put a bounty on their solution--$15,000 to the first person somewhere in the world that can create a molecule that has the following characteristics. It smells like this and it’s machine washable. And there’s a race on then among those who tend to troll that site—a lot of unemployed chemical engineers, among others—and somebody comes up with the answer, submits it, it’s validated, collects $15,000, and in exchange, it’s as if he or she ever had the idea. That becomes the property--lock, stock, and barrel—of the company that commissioned it for the money, big money, that it paid for it.

So that’s sort of on the high end of putting problems out for solution, where you’re basically indifferent to who’s solving the problem, what their motives are, anything else. You may not even meet them or correspond with them; you just get a solution for your money that required a human brain in the middle.

Then one notch down, there’s a company like LiveOps. LiveOps, from what I can tell, is extremely successful, and it’s a company that will employ anyone in America, at the moment, who can get through its test. And the test is administered automatically over its website, a number of questions, reading comprehension, kind of like a mini SAT test, and other languages, if you’ve got them, are tested. And then they also test your computer outfit, do you have a decent internet connection, do you know how to use your PC, more or less, and a working headset.

Read the full transcript at